UN’s War On Drugs a Failure, Group Says

A major report by the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) has called the United Nation’s Drug Strategy over the last decade a failure. It has called for a major change in global policy on illegal narcotics.

The report claims that UN’s ‘war on drugs’ have negatively impacted health, human rights, security, and development while it had no ‘significant effect on global supply.

According to the report, drug-related deaths have increased by 145% over the last decade, with more than 71,000 overdose deaths in the United States in 2017 alone. At least 3,940 people were executed for drug offenses around the world over the last 10 years, while drug crackdowns in the Philippines resulted in around 27,000 extrajudicial killings.

The IDPC, a conglomerate of 177 national and international NGOs concerned with drug policy and drug abuse, is urging the UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs to consider a new path in its narcotics strategy for the next 10 years in the run-up to a March 2019 summit in Vienna, Austria.

‘This report is another nail in the coffin for the war on drugs,’ said Ann Fordham, the Executive Director of IDPC, in a prepared statement. ‘The fact that governments and the UN do not see fit to properly evaluate the disastrous impact of the last ten years of drug policy is depressingly unsurprising.’

‘Governments will meet next March at the UN and will likely rubber-stamp more of the same for the next decade in drug policy. This would be a gross dereliction of duty and a recipe for more blood spilled in the name of drug control.’

Mexico for instance, recorded a 27% increase in homicides recorded over 2016, the bulk of these being connected to drug-related causes according to the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography.

In addition to fueling violence, the existing policy of criminalizing drug use has also resulted in mass incarceration, the report said. One in five prisoners is currently imprisoned for drug offenses, many on charges related to possession for personal use.

The report also said that 33 jurisdictions retain the death penalty for drug offenses in violation of international standards. However, in March, US President Donald Trump proposed making drug trafficking a capital offense in response to the country’s ongoing opioid crisis.

‘What we learn from the IDPC shadow report is compelling. Since governments started collecting data on drugs in the 1990s, the cultivation, consumption and illegal trafficking of drugs have reached record levels,’ wrote Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand and a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, in the report’s foreword.

‘Moreover, current drug policies are a serious obstacle to other social and economic objectives and the ‘war on drugs’ has resulted in millions of people murdered, disappeared, or internally displaced.’

Last week Canada became the first country in the G7 group of industrialized nations to legalize the recreational use of marijuana.